"Bribery" is a very complex and charged allegation and is very difficult to prove when it comes to the president. Everything Trump did in his interactions with Ukraine, he's allowed to do and has the power to do under is office, at least when looking at it at face value. A president has the power to withhold money from another country in return for things he wants them to do - they do it all the time. The issue here is the improper motive: Trump withheld the money in order to get a political advantage for himself.

That's all pretty clear to us. But that takes a lot of explaining to the average person. And when you're explaining, you're not winning and can easily get stuck in rabbit holes.

I think the Democrats escaped that rabbit hole by charging Abuse of Power. What makes Trump's action not just a simple and permissible "quid pro quo" that all presidents do is the fact that he used his power to get something he wanted for himself - i.e., he abused his power. No other person in America has the power to get another country to help them smear a political opponent by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars government funding from them. That kind of power is awesome and sacred and should not be used for individual political gain, which is exactly what Trump did. People can understand that.

In short, I think they actually DID charge Trump with bribery - the abuse of power is the bribery. But they haven't given the Republicans any opening to spend endless hours arguing about the definition of bribery, etc. They laid out what he did, which is undisputed and can now cut straight to the chase of proving that Trump abused his power by using government money to pressure a foreign government for help in a political campaign - and since the facts of that are undisputed, they've set up an easier and much stronger case for the American public to understand and accept.

That's my take.

But that said, I think we should have learned by now that Pelosi, Schiff et al know what they're doing and are on top of their game - and that knee-jerk second-guessing of them, especially before we know what they're doing and why they're doing it, is unhelpful and counterproductive.